Ellie nodded, relieved that she had an excuse. She wondered if Colin knew that.
“I can’t disappoint my fan base, I guess,” she agreed.
“Good,” he pronounced, glad that that was settled. “Then I’ll see you at the apartment.”
As he turned to go, Ellie caught her lower lip between her teeth, debating. And then called after him just before he was out of earshot.
“Colin?”
He turned around thinking she was going to beg off after all, so he braced himself. In the end, the decision was up to her. He knew he couldn’t very well drag her off by her hair. There was only so much persuading he could do.
“Yes?” Colin stood there, waiting.
She’d never had a problem with apologies. If she was wrong, she always willingly owned up to it. But this time around, it was hard. Hard for so many reasons. Now that it was out in the open, there was no turning back. It had to be done.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I knew who you were right after the interview. Actually, after it happened—after Brett was killed—I did have every intention of finding you. I wanted to talk to you, to ask you questions. I wanted you to fill me in on Brett’s last moments.”
Since she hadn’t tried to get in contact with him, he asked, “What happened?”
Ellie pressed her lips together. “I just couldn’t make myself do it,” she said honestly. “So I kept finding excuses and before I knew it, too much time had gone by and I felt awkward about opening up what had to be an old case for you.”
That wasn’t the whole truth and she knew it. Taking another breath, she told him, “I guess I felt that until I actually talked to you about Brett’s last moments, I didn’t have to deal with them myself. That way, the whole thing wasn’t quite real to me.” She flushed ruefully. “I guess you probably think that’s stupid, don’t you?”
Colin offered an understanding smile. “Actually, it happens more than you think.”
She waved her hand at him, dismissing his words. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
His face gave nothing away as he asked, “Is it working?”
It coaxed another smile from her. “I’ll see you at your apartment,” she told him.
“Okay,” he agreed. “And if you’re not there within ten minutes of my arriving home, I’m going to come looking for you.”
“Duly warned,” she responded, grateful that he had made this easy for her. Grateful that he hadn’t just written her off as being a crazy woman with too much baggage for him to bother with.
* * *
The best way to handle this was not to think, Ellie told herself as she drove behind Colin’s sedan. And she wasn’t going to make too much of this. Benteen was just being a friend. She didn’t want anything more than that.
Because if she did make it anything more than that, she would be setting herself up for another grievous fall fraught with pain. The man was a police detective, for heaven’s sakes. Police detectives risked getting shot in the line of duty on a daily basis. She couldn’t even allow herself to fall in love with a dentist and the only risk a dentist ran was possibly accidentally drilling his own fingers. The point was that most professions weren’t being paid to face death on a regular basis.
A police detective was, so there couldn’t be anything more between them than there was right at this moment.
That meant that she was just going over to spend some time with a friend, his niece and the overly energetic puppy she had gifted him with. Nothing else would happen.
Ever.
Granted, she had kissed him, but, she silently insisted, it was only to get that out of the way. Now that it was, she could go on without having to worry. Like Peter Pan, whose mantra was “I won’t grow up,” she lived by the mantra “I won’t fall in love.” And nothing would make her fall again.
Nothing.
* * *
When she arrived at the door to Colin’s apartment some fifteen minutes later, she knocked once, mentally giving him to the count of ten before turning around to go back to her car. The drive over had waned her initial resolution to view this whole interaction between the sexy police detective and herself as something residing in the realm of playfully platonic. She was better off keeping her “interactions” to a minimum. “Minimum” did not include spending the evening with him, even with a dog and a niece between them as buffers.
Despite the pep talk to the contrary, she knew she was playing with fire.
Ellie was up to nine and ready to turn on her heel to leave when the door opened. She didn’t know whether to cry or cheer.
But instead of Colin or his precocious, animated niece, Ellie found herself looking up at a rather tall, somewhat austere-looking older woman who wore her fading blond hair in what looked to be a braided crown woven about her head.
The next moment, she realized that this had to be Colin’s next-door neighbor, Olga, the woman who offered to clean his house for free and who baked cherry pies to die for.
About to introduce herself—and possibly beg off—Ellie never got the chance to do either. The second the woman saw her, she caught her by the hand and enthusiastically pulled her into the apartment, declaring, “You must be the reporter lady,” in an accent that was veritably thick enough to cut with a knife, preferably one that butchers used.
“I must be,” Ellie heard herself replying as she all but flew over the threshold, not of her own accord. At the last moment, she steadied herself to keep from falling over.
Olga gave her a quick appraising look, apparently pleased with what she saw.
Olga smiled to herself.
“Your reporter lady is here,” Olga announced, tossing the words over her shoulder and then adding, “And now I am not.”
And just like that, the woman was gone.
Chapter Twelve
“I guess Olga approves of you,” Colin told her.
Ellie turned around to find both the detective and his niece standing behind her. Heather was holding the puppy—or trying to. Pancakes seemed to have her own ideas about the situation and tried to use her hind legs to climb down the girl’s body.
The older woman hadn’t given her any indication that she liked her, Ellie thought. Had she missed something? “How do you know that?”
“Simple,” Colin answered. “Because she let you in.”
Ellie nodded, following Colin, Heather and their furry friend into the living room. “I guess she did look like she could physically block the doorway to keep me out if she wanted to.”
Forgetting about Olga, Ellie turned toward Pancakes. The puppy was practically vibrating in her efforts to get free. Heather, however, had a tight grip on the dog, determined not to let her escape just yet.
“So, how’s everything going with Pancakes?” Ellie asked. The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she noticed the chew marks along the floorboard where the two sides came together at the corner. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about her teething, were you?”
Ellie bent down to get a better look at the damage. Apparently, Pancakes had gnawed away at the paint clear down to the drywall. “Some paint should take care of that,” she told Colin, rising. “And then, after it dries, spray everything shin level and lower with bitter apple.”
Colin would have been the first to admit that he didn’t know all that much about painting walls, but he was fairly certain that bitter apples had nothing to do with it.
“Come again?”
“Pet stores carry it,” Ellie told him, stroking the culprit as she continued to try to wiggle out of Heather’s arms. “It’s used mostly to keep dogs from chewing on themselves, but it’ll probably do the same thing for the walls and your furniture if you spray them.” She shrugged as she turned to look at him. “At least it won’t hurt anything.”
<
br /> “Worth a shot,” Colin agreed.
“Olga brought another one of her casseroles over, so you don’t have to cook tonight,” Heather announced with a grin, making it sound as if having Ellie prepare dinner was a regular occurrence rather than something that had happened just twice.
Ellie supposed that in the world of a ten-year-old, anything that had been done more than once fell under the heading of Routine.
Exchanging looks with Colin to make sure that his invitation to her was meant to include dinner—he nodded, so she assumed it did—Ellie answered, “Sounds good.”
Heather planted herself directly in front of her. “I have to take Pancakes out for a walk so she can go to the bathroom. Wanna come?” she asked.
“Sounds even better,” Ellie told her before Colin had the chance to tell his niece not to pester her. She could see the reprimand coming. “Really,” she emphasized, looking at the detective.
Colin held his peace.
Serpentine patches of grass were woven all through the apartment-complex grounds, going around the various apartments and giving the development a rather rustic look reminiscent of the city’s earlier days, before it was incorporated. Because of that, there was no shortage of places that Pancakes could stop and investigate. Investigation in this case consisted mainly of sniffing, sometimes so deeply that the dog wound up sneezing, something that in turn entertained Heather.
“I didn’t know dogs could sneeze,” she said.
“Pets are a constant source of education,” Ellie told her.
“Did you have pets when you were my age?” Heather asked.
“My dad was allergic to anything with fur, so we couldn’t have any pets in the house,” she told the girl. “Other than a goldfish, of course, and that doesn’t really count. You can’t play with a goldfish,” she added with a wink.
Heather giggled, then fell into silence for a moment before saying, “You can think of Pancakes as your dog, too, if you want.”
Ellie slipped an arm around the little girl’s shoulders and hugged Heather to her. “That’s very generous of you.” Heather beamed at her in response.
* * *
By the time she, Heather and the puppy returned to their starting point, Ellie felt a great deal more relaxed.
“I asked Ellie to come to my school for career day,” Heather announced the moment they walked into the apartment.
In the kitchen warming up Olga’s casserole, Colin stuck his head out and gave his niece a reproving look. “Heather, what did I tell you about that?”
Heather looked up at him innocently. “You said that Ellie was too busy to come to my classroom, but when I asked her, she said she wasn’t.”
Colin suppressed a frustrated sigh. It was a losing battle with Heather, so he turned to her target instead. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“I know. I already said yes,” Ellie told him, taking the leash off Pancakes.
He knew how easily his niece could wrap him around her finger, but he couldn’t allow her to do that to Ellie. “Heather’s a hard person to say no to,” he acknowledged, “but she can’t expect you to just drop everything and talk to a class of ten-year-olds,” he said, looking at Heather even though his words were directed at Ellie.
The crestfallen expression on Heather’s face was enough to seal the fate of this dispute.
“That’s okay,” Ellie assured him. “They like this kind of thing at the station. They’ll probably send Jerry to film it.”
“Jerry?” Colin asked.
“My cameraman. You remember, big guy—” she held her hand up high “—curly hair.”
Now he remembered. “Oh, right.”
“I’m gonna be on TV?” Heather cried. She was already excited by the prospect of having Ellie come to speak to her class; having it all immortalized on film would send her over the top.
“We’ll see how this goes,” Ellie cautioned, not wanting Heather to get overly excited until the segment was approved. Turning to Colin, she told him, “She’s got a lot in common with the puppy.”
Colin merely sighed. “Tell me about it.” And then he remembered the casserole he’d left on top of the stove. “Okay, let’s eat before it all gets cold,” he urged, ushering Ellie and his niece into the kitchen.
As she allowed herself to be brought into the kitchen, Ellie couldn’t help thinking that it felt really nice being part of a family unit. She knew that it was just an illusion and only temporary, but she could still enjoy the moment and pretend that this was real.
* * *
Ellie wasn’t exactly sure how it started, but a pattern seemed to begin forming, pulling her in almost without her being conscious of it.
Before she knew it, at least four, sometimes five, evenings a week would find her having dinner with Colin and his niece. Oh, there were various pretexts involved in this unfolding pattern—the first and foremost was that she had somehow gotten herself roped into helping Heather train the lively Pancakes. The goal, for everyone’s sake, was to turn the ever-livelier puppy into if not an obedient pet, one who at least waited for her walk to relieve herself and who understood what the commands sit and come meant.
Ellie promised the little girl—and Colin—that more commands would come once Pancakes got those two down pat.
Training the dog took patience and perseverance and, most of all, a lot of man-hours, or in this case, woman-hours. Colin himself couldn’t always be there, because the dictates of his job would call him away. Thieves, as he’d explained once to Heather, did not keep regular nine-to-five hours.
And there were times when Ellie was sent out to cover a late-breaking story. Calling Colin to make her apologies was particularly difficult whenever Heather answered the phone.
The preteen always sounded severely disappointed if she couldn’t see her that evening. So much so that sometimes Ellie wondered if her absence even registered with Heather’s uncle. That was when she reminded herself that they were just friends, nothing more, and there was no reason for him to be anywhere nearly as disappointed as Heather was.
After all, except for that one time, Colin hadn’t even tried to kiss her again, so the parameters defining their relationship were clearly etched. They were friends, growing to be very good friends, but definitely nothing more than that.
She clung to the label for her own protection—even though at times it actually did really bother her.
* * *
“Tell me one thing,” she said to Heather the morning before she addressed the girl’s fourth-grade class on career day several weeks later. “Why am I here instead of your uncle? Aren’t students supposed to bring a family member to these things?”
“Well, you’re like family,” Heather answered, saying it as if she believed that with every fiber of her being. “And anyway, you’re a lot more famous than Uncle Colin is.”
She didn’t want the girl to get her priorities mixed up. Being famous wasn’t everything. It should score very low on her list of aspirations.
“But your uncle’s a police detective and that’s very important, honey. The police keep our community safe.”
“I know that,” Heather said, dismissing the point the next moment. “But people see you on TV,” she stressed. “Everybody in my class knows who you are. They all watch you,” she said proudly.
Ellie gave it one more try. “Just remember, if you’re ever in trouble, you call a policeman,” she emphasized, “not a reporter.”
Which was what she wound up telling her audience at the end of her presentation, hoping that the message registered with the class, although truthfully, she had her doubts. They all seemed far too interested in being on camera themselves.
She’d been right about her news station viewing this as a good opportunity to both promote some good publicity and get a feel-goo
d human-interest story. Everyone wanted to know when the segment would air so they could tell their family and friends.
* * *
“So how did it go?” Colin asked that evening when he finally came home. His shift had run over. Consequently, he came home several hours after Ellie had arrived, relieving Olga.
“Your niece is a hit,” Ellie told him.
“Everyone wants to be my friend now that I brought Ellie to school,” she announced.
He looked at Heather, concerned about her feelings. “You know that’s not going to last, right? They should want to be your friend because they like you, not because you know someone they see on TV.”
“I know that. Ellie already explained that to me. But how are they going to know if they like me if they don’t talk to me? Now they talk to me because I brought in Ellie.”
“Hard to argue with logic like that,” Ellie quipped. “If I were you, I’d start putting money aside for her college fund. This one’s got the makings of a really good lawyer.”
Colin laughed and shook his head. “Let’s eat—I’m starved.”
“Tonight’s dinner is Hungarian goulash. Olga brought it over,” Ellie told him. “She actually smiled at me today.”
“Told you she liked you,” Colin said, helping her set the table.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly go that far,” Ellie countered. “But I think that Olga might be coming around since Heather told her that I went to her class for career day.”
“See that?” Colin said. “A classroom of kids bests a dour Russian lady and you’ve got a classroom full of ten-year-olds idolizing you.”
Ellie distributed the napkins at the three place settings. “That’s just because they think being on camera is glamorous. They haven’t seen the segments where I’ve had to stand out in the pouring rain, reporting on ‘the storm of the century,’ which turns out to be just three days of bad weather. Or the time the station had me reporting on the hurricane that was just off the coast,” she recalled. “I looked like a wet rat.”
Twice a Hero, Always Her Man Page 12